I just talked to the lead surgeon, Dr Hald. She says, nothing laparoscopic, everything will be knife work.
Into the belly of the etc
We are at Geisinger Danville and all checked in. At this point, you go up to the pre-surgical waiting room…..
……where you are only allowed to take one person with you.
So Sarah’s Mom, Maureen, is up there with her. Having suspected we might wind up in some sort of holding pattern Hell, I have my laptop (and my Nook, and my DS) and the comfy headphones and a stack of movies and games ans so forth. So, I’m settling in for the siege.
The rough schedule is, first Sarah has a ~40 minute procedure to set her up (with a stent, I think;) then, at some point presumably not long after that, she has a nominal four and a half hour block scheduled for the actual surgical procedure.
It’s a double procedure, with one surgeon going after the mother load in her colon, and the other aiming at the second chunk of evil, in her liver.
They might be able to do part of that laparoscopically, but apparently that call will be made once they start and actually see what it looks like.
I’ll keep you all updated when anything happens.
Fuck cancer.
Nick
Testing the Sarahnet infodump
This is a test. This is only a test. If this were a real post, Sarah would ALREADY be on drugs!
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Nick, aka Mr Sarah. I will be trying to keep you all updated through that period where Sarah is too stoned to type.
If, anytime in the next week or two, anyone really really needs an update, or their hand held, RIGHT now, emailing me at
thorvaaldr at gmail (etc)
Is the way I am most likely to see the fastest.
I mean, I could give you a phone number, but I honestly do check my gmail MUCH more often than I check my voicemail.
Meanwhile, I’ll be here, feeding the kittens.
TTFN,
Nick
Briefest of updates
The insurance company assures me they are re-running my claims and all will be well: the half that didn’t approve my IMRT has looked at the other half’s paperwork and approved it.
As insurance problems go, I’ve had very minor ones that have been resolved effectively. I’ve heard some amazing horror stories.
I still strongly support single payer health care, though. The US system is insane.
Fun and games
Last week was all the medical things: MRI, appointment with liver surgeon, appointment with urology (the latter two mainly to be informed of all the things that could go wrong and sign consent forms), and then the full afternoon in Danville to be poked and prodded.
Pre-surgery physical, blood work, EKG, yadda yadda yadda. I continue to be disgustingly healthy, except for the obvious. I also got information about pre-surgery prep (much like colonoscopy prep), post-surgery care (not allowed to eat ANYTHING I LIKE for quite some time: no whole grains, no nuts, berries, vegetables, etc. I can have canned vegetables. [Blergh.] I will be living on poached eggs, white bread, and plain yogurt apparently. Fortunately that’s only for a few weeks, then I should be able to gradually start eating like myself again.
I will have a temporary ostomy, so one of the stops was to meet with an ostomy nurse, who explained the procedure (the science is so very cool!), the basics of ostomy care, let me play with the apparatus and then gave me the sample to take home. I very much like the ostomy nurse, and she agreed at the end that she was indeed going to go off and tell her colleagues about the entertaining patient who compared herself to a fistulated cow. (Biologists do not have the same sense of humor as regular people, nor do nurses.)
So that all went very well, and it was a nice day to drive to Danville (it’s a pretty drive in good weather), and we stopped for chocolate milkshakes on the way back.
And then I got home, and discovered a $67,289 bill for the radiation therapy my insurance company had approved before we started. Remember that? The fun of dealing with Federal BCBS to get my treatment declared medically necessary, and the three-week delay getting started? Apparently they changed their mind somewhere along the way and didn’t bother to tell me. And of course it was after business hours on Friday, so I gathered my paperwork and fussed all weekend.
This morning I called my contact (if you’re given a name and a direct number for an entity like this, SAVE IT). She was very nice again and explained what happened to me.
This is horrendously complicated…
There are two parts to the Federal BCBS, entirely separate entities apparently. One handles the professional claims, one handles the facilities claims. (I knew there were two addresses, but not how this worked.)
The professional side, the employer of my contact, deemed IMRT medically necessary and approved it. The facilities side did their own investigation and decided it wasn’t (just as the professional side originally did).
So the professional side is going to send all the documentation to the facilities side, which will presumably now cough up the money, or whatever small portion they can get away with paying.
My contact also tells me that the message at the bottom of my explanation of benefits is correct, and that the provider is contractually prohibited from billing me for the amount that insurance didn’t pay. Which kind of baffles me, but means I may not be liable for the $67k even though the provider billed me.
Except for slapping around insurance companies as necessary, I have the entire week free from medical anything. I feel great, and am hoping to sneak one (or two!) more kayaking trips in. I’m pretty well caught up at work, with a few exceptions, and have only a couple things to do at home, like mow the grass this weekend. Everything else can go hang.
Pretty, pretty pictures
I got my CT results this morning. They look great. I mean, I still have cancer, but the liver tumor continues to shrink, and my lungs are clear.
(insert enormous sigh of relief here)
That puts me on track for surgery on September 23, which if all goes well might turn me into someone who does not have cancer. (That and another six months of chemo, anyway.)
I’ve been trying to be a positive-leaning realist throughout this; the latest news pushes reality itself in a positive direction.
Short stories
I just finished a new story and submitted it, making three that are out now (and four that have not yet been resubmitted after rejection).
It seemed like a good time to look through the stories in progress, and do a first-lines meme a la Elizabeth Bear. It turns out I have eleven stories that have words written (not just notes or outline), and here they are (some with final titles, some with working titles):
The Antonym of Rainbow: A can-can line of blue elephants gyrated through the wormhole void.
The Dirt of Denela: Loredana Ney’s troubles ended here, up against a red-toned crater wall, with the dirt of Denela under her fingernails and poison lining her throat.
Learning to be Terrestrial: I cupped the full mug of coffee in my hands, the memory of warmth enough to keep my fingers wrapped around a cold cup.
Tapestry: The angel arrived in the afternoon.
Kitchen, Arthur, Fragile: The kitchen glowed. Sunlight streaming through the windows blended with the shine of the small fire on the hearth and both bounced off the clean whitewashed walls until the whole room shone with directionless radiance.
All the Leaves on Mars: Whisper-thin sheets of stainless steel piled to the ceiling, compulsively stacked, impeccably organized.
Alpha Says Omega: Misha laid her hand over Tom’s, formed a smile so practiced it appeared spontaneous.
The Future is Drawn in Maps of the Past: The knock echoed through the office. Jim jumped, long and painful experience pulling his hand away from the paper taped to the drafting board.
Oyster: “I’m going to find a blue one!”
Gray: The sky was gray, as smooth as if it had been airbrushed, the same shade as the dishes she slid into the matching cupboard.
Carnival Glass: I tied a bandana over my hair, glad I was alone in the house so nobody could see it.
Each step is forward
It’s over two weeks since I’ve poisoned or irradiated myself, and I feel as good as I’ve felt in 2014. It took a week and a half for the tiredness and digestive issues from the radiation to mostly fade, and as I understand it that’s pretty fast. My brain is even starting to work properly again. (Whew!)
I still haven’t much stamina, and my yoga practice reminds me daily that 28 doses of pelvic radiation does nothing good for your flexibility or muscle tone, even if you did yoga the whole time. My fingers and toes are still numb: they improved noticeably the first few days off of the Xeloda, but the rate of improvement trailed off over time. It’s still getting better, but frustratingly slowly. I wanted to do some longer walks and some jogging during my “free time,” but numb feet make that uncomfortable and even unsafe. (I’m still walking the boxer a mile or two a day, much to his delight.)
The medical appointment rounds started up again on Wednesday, with a very wet drive to Danville to meet with my colon surgeon. It was three and a half hours of driving (oh hi unexpected torrential downpour), and nearly an hour waiting around, for a fifteen-minute meeting in which I didn’t learn anything much.
The plans for my autumn are solidifying, though. My likely surgery date is September 23, much later than I’d hoped due to the insurance company screwing around, and late enough to jeopardize my World Fantasy attendance. Before then I have a follow-up with my medical oncologist, a follow-up with my radiation oncologist, an MRI, a CT scan, and the third colonoscopy of 2014 (there oughtta be a law!), plus a pre-surgery physical.
The only worrisome thing out of all that is the CT scan: if there are bad changes (tumor growth, or reappearance of the little lung spots that disappeared after chemo), I may get sent back to do more chemo before surgery, or even be declared a poor surgical candidate. So: scanxiety.
On the really good side, though, I had a CEA test this week, the first one since before the radiation.
10. That’s 1 0 – ten. TEN.
There aren’t enough exclamation points in the world for that number. Yes, the normal level is less than 3.5, but at diagnosis mine was 2200, and it spiked to nearly 4000 when I started chemo. It was 42 when I finished infusion chemo, so it’s less than 25% of my previous test. The science, it is working.
So I will continue forward under the assumption that I will have surgery, and it will remove the large tumors, and then I will probably have more chemo to mop up any lingering evil, and then I will be cancer-free and do ALL THE THINGS.
